‘What does it mean, there’s a bomb in the elephant?’
‘What?’
‘The English idiom: there’s a bomb in my elephant. What does it mean?’
‘Where did you see it? What are you reading?’
‘I am not reading anything. One of the Americans called me and said it. I want to know what it means. It sounded important.’
‘I’m not sure. Wait.’
She could hear the sound of pages being flicked in a specialist dictionary of English idioms.
‘Bomb can mean to perform badly on stage. “The comedian’s act was poor so he bombed.” That’s negative. Or it can be positive: “It goes like a bomb”, meaning performs really well—typical English. Two meanings, each of which is the opposite of the other. No logic in the language.’
‘But what about There is a bomb in my elephant?’
More flicking noises. ‘Nothing. Not listed under bomb or elephant.’
‘Old dictionary?’
‘Not so old. About twelve years.’
‘So what’s the answer? Must be recent coinage. Can you guess?’
‘Let me ask Tu Feng Rong. He was in Europe last month. I’ll call you back.’
Zhang lowered the phone. Typical of the Americans to be so wily and unpredictable—and at the last possible moment, with the two Presidents due to arrive in a few minutes. Americans could never be trusted. The elephant, she vaguely recalled, was the symbol of one of the main US political parties, the Democrats or the Republicans. That must be something to do with it. And the single biggest US–China issue over the past few months, in the run-up to this summit, was the One China Policy which covered relations between China and the renegade province of Taiwan. The Democrats— or was it the Republicans?—were opposed to it—or were they in favour of it?
If that was it, it would only be a temporary problem, as it was just a matter of time before the Taiwan issue resolved itself. China’s military leaders were acquiring foreign arms as fast as they could, aiming to hit ‘the crossover point’ as soon as possible—the point at which the People’s Liberation Army was more powerful than the Taiwanese defence force, even with equipment from Western allies. Some said that China had already achieved it; others said it would be a year or two before the balance was clearly in the Motherland’s favour. At that point, the leaders’ noble dream of one China could be realised: the Taiwanese would have no choice. This was important to many people in power, particularly the elderly, but she had to admit that it meant little to younger people.
Commander Zhang was a Communist Party member, but her card was in her breast pocket wallet, not her heart. There was a crucial two centimetres of difference. The ideological content of membership had somehow become detached and drifted away from its practical considerations. There had been quiet but important changes over the past decade. The Party card had begun to identify not your political affiliation but your age, sex and job. The vast majority of members—some said 80 per cent—were more than thirty-five years old. More than 80 per cent were men: membership had little attraction for women. Also, you had to be a member if you wanted to achieve anything in the Chinese civil service. It was almost a union card for government officials and army officers. So a Party card almost inevitably meant old, male and employed by the authorities. In her case—she was twenty-nine, the youngest commander they had ever had—in her case only the third of the three typical member characteristics was accurate.
The Party was changing. Every year or two campaigns would be launched to attract younger members, more females, and people in private industry. These programs usually worked. People quickly signed up once they heard what was on offer. There was a host of privileges, some official, some unwritten, that accumulated to Party members. Your children got into better schools, you heard what was happening before ordinary people did, and you had a much better choice of jobs. And most importantly of all, you were part of the network. You were linked in to the circles of people who had power—and that meant the military and paramilitary forces, and their allies.
The Americans did not understand this, nor did they understand how China’s armed forces worked. Yes, they ostensibly guarded the borders of the country. But they also guarded the ideological borders of the Party. If there was dissent in the country, that was equivalent to the borders of the Party being attacked, so of course the dissent was snuffed out with great force. Taiwan and Hong Kong were on the fringes of the mainland in terms of both physical borders and ideological borders—so it was no wonder that both were kept on short leashes.
When Commander Zhang, who was from Nanning City, had originally moved to Shanghai, she had thought about joining the People’s Liberation Army and becoming part of the 2.5 million-strong green-uniformed body that makes the biggest contribution to keeping the Party in power. But she found its business interests too anti-ideological: what was an army body doing running nightclubs and factories? It had been trying to cut back on its business interests for years, but the clean-up was going slowly. As a result, the PLA’s prime motivations were blurred. She felt there was a lack of professionalism in the way it was managed. You run an army differently from the way you run a business empire. So instead, she had joined the People’s Armed Police, a smaller body spun off from the PLA in 1983, but with key tasks such as guarding important government institutions. She had quickly risen to being a senior office in the Special Police, a unit of the Internal Guards Corps, although for this mission they were sharing duties with the State Guests Protection Unit.
Both the PLA and the People’s Armed Police were managed by the Central Military Affairs Commission, an eleven-man group made up of senior generals plus the most important Party leaders. The small print in the articles said that the Commission’s chairman was elected by the National People’s Congress, a body which represented the masses. But that was a joke. The hot seat always went to the Party’s top man. Mao Zedong, a charismatic but fatally flawed military leader, held the chairmanship of the Commission for years, and passed it on to Deng Xiaoping, another former soldier. Deng held on to power even after resigning as head of the Communist Party of China. How did he do it? He kept the seat of chairman of the Commission. When Jiang Zemin took the job in 1989, and Hu Jintao in 2004, there was concern that they lacked the military background necessary for the role. But both increased military budgets, ensuring that they kept the support of the real power base in China.
Americans always overestimated the importance of politics and politicians and political systems like democracy. In China, power was what counted, and the Central Military Affairs Commission was where the power lay.
Commander Zhang’s phone rang. ‘Yes?’
‘There’s a bomb in my elephant: Rong has never heard it either. He thinks it is something sexual. He says it is almost definitely offensive. Do not say yes. Do not repeat it to anyone else. I suggest you don’t reply or react in any way.’
‘Thank you, Wu lao-shi.’ Zhang put the phone down and tried to dismiss Dooley’s barked words. But the memory of the call would not leave her. There was an urgency in the American agent’s voice that she found impossible to put aside. And the fact that he was talking about cancelling the event— how could he joke about such a thing just minutes before the two Presidents arrived? Perhaps the man was on drugs. Amercians did that sort of thing all the time, she knew. Even former president Bill Clinton liked to talk about inhaling drugs, didn’t he? And wasn’t it common knowledge that George W Bush was an alcoholic? Maybe Dooley was high on something. After all, had this been a serious emergency, the alarm would have been set off and sirens would be shaking the entire Shanghai Grand Theatre.
The alarm went off and sirens shook the entire Shanghai Grand Theatre.
In a lake city in the fifth century, a rebel warlord named Xie killed the king and took his palace.
He searched for the ring bearing the royal seal but could not find it. He tore the building to dust but it was not there.
His men even sear
ched the stools of the young princes in case one of them had eaten it. But they had not.
The judges ruled that since no one had the royal seal, the land could have no king. Darkness settled on the kingdom.
The princes lived in the dust with only the birds to talk to.
One year later, the eldest prince turned up at the court with the ring and the judges proclaimed him king. The judges asked him where he had hidden it.
He said: ‘I did not hide it. I put the ring on the foot of the bar-headed lake goose. Every year the geese fly five thousand li away for the winter. But they always return to their original homes.’
Blade of Grass, even people who live in the dust can get friends in high places, and sometimes unexpected ones.
Remember the saying of wise man Mo Zhou: ‘You can go no further than halfway into a dark forest: from then on you are coming out of the other side.’
From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.
The problem they had had outside the theatre was repeating itself at Renmin Park Gate Number Five, through which they were trying to leave the area: individuals and families were surging around them, wanting to touch the elephant.
‘Don’t touch,’ Joyce said. ‘Bomb inside. Big bomb. Bang. I mean baang.’ But the crowds smiled up at her and ignored everything she said. What was the Mandarin phrase? Already she had forgotten it. She shouted down to Wong: ‘A farm. Fields. That’s what we need. Crops. They go for miles, and there’s no one around. Paddy fields, maybe. Where’s the nearest farm?’
Wong grimaced and gave her his how-stupid-can-you-get look. ‘This is city centre. This is middle of biggest city in China. There is no farms here.’
‘Oh. Any other parks?’
‘No empty ones.’
‘So what’s plan B?’
‘What?’
Joyce closed her eyes again. ‘What are we going to do?’ she said quietly to herself. She decided she needed to try again to visualise the answer. She placed her palms over her eyes to create true darkness. In her mind’s eye she saw a picture of crowds of people milling around—and then she saw a truck speeding along with the elephant inside, rushing past all the crowds, heading for the wide open spaces. It was a low-sided vehicle, and the elephant was happily waving its trunk at the people they passed. They were approaching a massive, clean, flower-lined animal hospital away from the city. That’s what they needed: a large vehicle to take them to an animal sanctuary filled with veterinary surgeons pulling on their gloves ready for an operation. ‘We need a van or a truck or a pickup or a horse box. See if you can hire one. How much time do we have left?’
‘Forty minutes, thirty seconds.’
Wong liked the idea—it seemed the only option, and a similar notion had occurred to him as soon as he realised how crowded the park was: they definitely needed vehicular help. So he stepped into the road near the north exit to the park and started examining vehicles rolling slowly past. By standing in the middle of the road and waving a handful of banknotes, he managed to persuade the seventh large vehicle which passed him to halt. It was a heavy van, fortunately with a low floor and a high ceiling. The driver, naked from the waist up despite the cool temperature, leaned out, a cheap cigarette attached to his lower lip. There followed a rapid conversation in Mandarin and Shanghainese which involved a lot of numbers and pointing to the elephant.
The phone Joyce had acquired from the fruit-seller rang. It was Linyao, who had slipped away during the panic at the theatre. ‘Joyce, it’s me. Where are you?’
‘We went into Renmin Park, just behind the theatre. Now we’ve headed out of the park again, out of Gate Number Five. Come and meet us here. We don’t know what to do. We need your help. Wong’s trying to get someone to take the elephant away from the city centre in a truck.’ By the time she had given directions to Linyao, agreement had been reached between Wong and the truck driver. The feng shui man looked unhappy—clearly the price had been high. ‘They’ll take us,’ he told Joyce.
‘Thank God you found an empty one.’
‘It’s not empty. That’s why I have to pay so much.’ He shook his head and groaned out loud, suffering physical pain as he pressed a pile of banknotes into the driver’s hands.
The men in the cabin quickly unloaded wardrobes and other furniture from the van and left it on the side of the road. One of the younger men was assigned to stand guard over it. The others urged Joyce to get the elephant inside.
It was not easy. The sickly beast did not want to enter a hot, dark, noisome, small room on such a cool and pleasant April day. But one of the men had a bunch of green bananas in his lunch box, which eventually lured the creature inside. The men slammed the door shut behind the beast and Wong and McQuinnie hopped into the cabin with the driver and his brother.
‘Where to?’ the driver asked.
‘Out of town,’ Wong said.
‘Which way?’
‘Any way. The quickest way.’ The feng shui master decided that it would not be wise to tell the men that they had just accepted the job of transporting a soon-to-explode bomb, so merely impressed upon them the importance of getting the elephant to some open air as quickly as possible.
‘We need to get there in forty-two minutes,’ he said, ‘so drive.’
The men turned the truck left into Huanghe Lu, heading north, and stopped dead, caught in a traffic jam. Everything came to a standstill for two minutes.
Just as Wong was going out of his mind with impatience, there was a slight movement: each vehicle advanced 20 metres or so, and then the traffic stopped again.
One more minute passed.
‘Cheese,’ whined Joyce.
‘Yes, cheese,’ Wong agreed. Why this extremely common English expression was not included in his book Advanced English Idioms Book 2, he had no idea.
He kept looking at his watch. It was awful how quickly time passed—and how slowly they moved. A metre. Then two metres. Then a whole minute with no movement at all. They had thirty-nine minutes left. And then thirty-eight. And then twenty-nine. And they had moved less than 50 metres from the park gates.
Cars, Wong decided, were the root of all societal evil. It was not money. It was not the love of money. It was cars. You could see this very clearly in China, which had developed a taste for the motor car later than most other countries. Cars introduced two great evils. The first was the removal of all relationships outside the family. In foot-powered communities, people fulfilled their needs from their neighbours: people within walking or cycling distance. They bought their rice or pancakes or choi sum from the farmer next door, their child was taught by the local teacher down the street, and the shoemaker around the corner made their footwear. And they in turn bought things from you. The interrelationships were vital, strong and were renewed every day. But once cars entered the picture, people drove to fashionable stores five or ten or a hundred minutes away, and bought things from people they did not know. They soon forgot the names of the vendors in their own villages. Soon, no one knew anyone outside their immediate families. Strangers dealt only with strangers. People no longer knew their neighbours. Natural human communities broke down. This was a huge, negative change which could be seen happening in rural villages, and blame for it could be squarely laid at the feet of Western capitalist car-makers such as Henry Ford.
The other bad thing that cars had introduced was the destruction of relationships between travellers. When Westerners designed cars, they built them with a one-word vocabulary: Honk, which was autospeak for ‘Get out of my way’. What a tragedy that this decision had been made by some Westerner one hundred years ago. What a shame that cars were not given a bigger vocabulary, or, if it had to be just one word, at least a more expressive word. Had cars been invented in the East, they would surely have been given a more subtle, versatile, pleasingly ambiguous word.
In Chinese, positive notions were often expressed negatively, because this added a delicate layer of civility to them. For example, the
Mandarin phrase for ‘You’re welcome’ was bukeqi, which literally meant ‘No need to be so polite’. In Cantonese ‘thank you’ was mm-goi, two characters which literally meant ‘not required’. The thought it contained was ‘I gratefully acknowledge that you have done a service for me despite the fact that we both know that you were not required to do so’. What a better world it would have been if the motor car’s one-word vocabulary was Honk meaning: Mm-goi.
In front of them, the cars sat immobile as mountains. There were Santana 2000s and Santana 3000s—it looked as if all the cars in Shanghai were a single brand: the locally produced models that the German Volkswagen company manufactured on the outskirts of the city. The vehicles may have had fancy German high-performance engineering inside them, but if there was nowhere to drive, there was nowhere to drive. There were said to be 40 000 taxis in Shanghai, and it looked as if every single one was stationary in front of them.
‘Aiyeeaa,’ Wong said, as another minute passed.
Next to him Joyce stared at the names of the buildings they were failing to pass. Prominent on Huanghe Lu was a boutique called Foreign Trade Finery. She couldn’t imagine a funky clothes shop in Sydney or London or New York with a name like that. People just seemed to think differently here. The stuff was all frilly and silly and brightly coloured. There was not one garment in the window that she would have worn, dead or alive. Shanghai had created its own fashion sense, taking bits from all over the world. Women in their twenties liked to wear denim hot-pants, as if they were in Arizona cop shows. Older women sometimes had a remarkable (to Joyce) ignorance of the horror of VPLs—visible panty lines. Just the previous day she had seen a woman in layers of transparent chiffon through which her underpants—large, ugly briefs that would have looked awful even on a man—were showing. And the men: when the sun came out, the men would roll up their shirts or T-shirts to get some cool air on their pot-bellies. Nothing could have been less attractive.
The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics Page 20